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Writing Inspiration: Where Do You Get All Your Ideas?

Ideas are everywhere. You just got to look for them.

Let’s assume that’s true.The whole world is basically an episode of Hoarders, chock-full from basement drain to gable vent of plot
threads and character snippets, and we Wannabes have chosen to be too
anesthetized to notice.If the Ideas-Are-Everywhere
theory were true, authors never would agree to book signings.Imagine the conversations in the fan queue:

“We pay you to be creative, right?So, I am supposed to take money out of my
pocket and put it into yours, even though I saw that idea on page ninety-eight
lying by the street lamp two blocks from your house?Anybody could have picked it up.”

Stories would be as mysterious and magical as an egg timer.(“I can’t believe it.It went ding
again!”)Everything would be
obvious.Worse yet, people with even the
slightest creative potential would lose their minds from idea overload.

Ideas would reach out and snag your toes at 3:00 a.m., when you
are convinced the bathroom migrated to the wrong side of the house.

The strange thing is I also agree with the Ideas-Are-Everywhere
theory.When looking at the bibliography
of writers like Robert Silverberg, it’s easy to imagine that he must be able to
turn anything into a story, and in Silverberg’s case an excellent story.

With the average person -- or at least me -- most ideas are
crap, though.Especially in their raw
form.

JACK:I suppose I ought
to try to do some writing, first.

WENDY:Any ideas,
yet?

JACK:Lots of
ideas.No good ones.

-- Stanley Kubrick’s The
Shining

If you have lots of ideas and no good ones, maybe you
stopped too soon.If everything you write feels stupid, it
probably means the good ideas just haven’t arrived yet.What you have written is still
embryonic.

Good ideas, the ones people are willing to pay for, are an
evolution from simpler forms.This
doesn’t mean that once you get an idea, wait six months for those red pumps you
saw in the closet to turn into the Ruby Slippers.Inspiration happens all the time, usually
when you are not thinking about the idea.However, it is a balancing act.If you don’t think about it at all, your subconscious discards the image
as unimportant, but hammering the idea into form will bring on frustration and
leave you with something that has been beaten to death.

Good ideas are not “gotten” they are developed.

Have you ever taken an art class?Students start with basic shapes.Circles, squares, cylinders, cones.Later, come shading and perspective.It’s all good at this point to keep exploring
the early stage of development.Keep
drawing those shapes and seeing them in all the objects around you until the
concepts become natural.This
beginner-level, basic stage is important.It is where you are going to want to give up.With patience you see, not the idea, but your
own thinking process quantum jump to the next stage and move closer into
something that looks professional.It
feels almost like your IQ raises a few points.This reminds me of my Typing I class in high school, back in the
Precambrian era where we learned to type on these humming things that had no
monitor and went clackety-clack!We were proud of ourselves because we finally
knew the location of every key on the keyboard.The instructor reminded us, however, that knowing the keyboard did not
make us typists.“Right now,” he said, “you
still have to make a conscious effort to press each key.In time, the movement will become automatic
and you will be typing words instead of individual letters.”

Back to the art class analogy.You’ve got the basic shapes down.Circles easily become spheres on paper.Trees and the human form are full of
cylinders and cones.Then, someone tells
you that light coming into a room behaves a little like water.Really?That is a more sophisticated concept than “the farthest surface from the
light is the darkest.”You can now use
that information.Before it might have
been interesting but was not yet useful as a tool.Your understanding broadens and it too becomes
more sophisticated.

Studying color, you learn that the darkest objects are the
closest to your eye and the farthest are pale because you are looking at them
through more air.It makes sense.Your understanding is evolving again.Even the way you touch the paper changes,
because now the portrait is so close to finished that the lightest whisper-touch
of the pencil makes the difference in the image looking off or looking real.

Ideas develop in the same way, as a series of passes.Some passes rake away debris.Others bring out new aspects.Layer after layer, the image sharpens and
becomes unique and interesting, until someone says, “How did you do that?Where do you get all your ideas?”

The reason this question annoys so many successful writers
is because it is so difficult to answer.It would take too long for them to explain about all the in-between
steps.Most writers probably don’t
remember them anyway.They simply made
the strokes over and over again, slowly moving the lines until they looked
right, darkening the contrast until it had depth.At some point they realize, “Wow, that’s
good.It looks real.”